Foes of the planned McKinley Village subdivision in east Sacramento filed a lawsuit Friday challenging the city’s environmental review process and its decision to build 336 homes on a site it says is better suited to heavy industry.

The Sacramento City Council approved the project April 29 by a 6-3 vote, praising its design and the work done by developers, led by former state treasurer Phil Angelides, to address numerous concerns of neighbors and officials.

“Although the Project was promoted by the Developer as a sustainable ‘infill’ development project, in reality, it consists of wedging a residential complex into a corner of the City that is utterly inappropriate for that use,” the complaint says.

“The Site is adjacent to a landfill site and surrounded by the Capital City Freeway (I-80) on one side and by the Union Pacific Railroad’s elevated embankments and tracks on the other side. As a result, future residents of the Project will be exposed to unacceptable health and safety risks.”

The complaint asks the court to order the city to rescind its approval of the project, to prepare a revised environmental impact report and to issue an injunction halting its progress.

One Response to East Sacramento and McKinley Village: Keep those yellow signs up! A lawsuit has been filed!

These are the two key issues and clearly this project is not good green “infill”. No doubt about it. The suit got these two issues right. If the judge asks the City to redo these parts of the EIR, namely, traffic analysis and air quality analysis, that will delay the project. While I am not optimistic about the outcome, this is worth doing. It’s not a frivolous case.

The air quality issue for the residents is a key issue, but I am not sure that the analysis will change anything based on what they did for this EIR. It’s hard to imagine amenities like a pool or parks and no safe way for residents to use them!

The revised traffic analysis might require the City to spend some money on traffic calming, but building the underpass for cars at Alhambra is hard to imagine given its costs. Does traffic calming work on 39th Street and on McKinley Blvd.? That may be the only mitigation measure that can be done.